Thu 25 Jun 2026 • Nick Kershaw
Why the race is the celebration, not the point
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At an Impact Marathon the week of work comes first and the race is the celebration. Why we built it backwards, and why it changes the whole thing.
People assume the race is the point. I understand why, it’s in the name of our organisation, and every single one of our events ends with a race across multiple distances. It is the thing with a number, a distance, a finish line, a medal. It is the noun in “marathon”. So when I say the race is the celebration and not the point, it sounds like a slogan, the kind of thing a company prints on a tote bag.
It is not a slogan. It is the actual order of operations, and getting the order right changes everything that follows.
Here is the ordinary version of running abroad. You fly in. You race. You fly out. Maybe there is a charity logo on the shirt and a fundraising page somewhere behind it. Maybe there is a bit of sightseeing, and some good local food. The trip is the race, and the run is scenery. My first race abroad was the Athens Marathon where I had a wonderful dinner the night before the race with my Greek family members - and shovelled down a good kebab post-race, before changing in the toilets and hop stepping to the airport to get home. It was amazing, but it didn’t connect me to Athens the way I had hoped it might. I remember the specific hollow feeling of standing in an extraordinary country having seen almost none of it, and touched none of it, beyond the tarmac and the start pen.
The Impact week runs the other way round. The week comes first. A small group lives in one community for several days and works on a project that community chose. In Muganza, Rwanda this year it was the sensory garden at the ASFA Physiotherapy Centre. You carry slabs. You eat together. You carry more slabs. You learn names. You hoe the field ready for banana trees. You hit up an acclimatisation run. You carry some more slabs. You go to a pub to watch the opening game of the World Cup thrust onto the wall by a hastily arranged projector. And then, at the end, you run, through the hills you have spent a week inside, past people who are no longer strangers. The race is the party at the end of the work. The celebration of it. The Victory Lap.
That single reordering fixes three things at once.
It fixes the economics. When the trip is built around a community and a project, the money has somewhere to go other than a hotel chain and an airport. The UN Environment Programme has estimated that in many developing destinations a large share of every tourist dollar leaks straight back out. Put the week before the race, anchored in one village, paying local crews and buying local materials, and you plug the leak almost by accident. The structure does the ethics for you.
It fixes the meaning. A finish line is a strange thing to fly across the world for. A finish line that comes after five days of building something with the people who live there is a different object entirely. You still get a medal, but it has a completely different weight in your hand. Impact Runners tell me this every year, usually in the same surprised tone, that the race was wonderful and it was somehow the smallest part.
And it fixes the relationship. If you arrive only to race, the community is your audience. If you arrive to work first, you are, briefly, theirs. That is a healthier way round. It keeps us humble, and it keeps the work honest, because you cannot perform impact for four days in front of the people who will live with the result.
I am wary of overclaiming here, because the voluntourism critique is real and I take it seriously. I’ve seen it abused, and done without ethics, I’ve also seen it delivered with good hearts, and well meaning but still be leaving a negative impact. A week of foreign hands is not what changes a village. Local people, paid and in charge, are what changes a village. What the runners bring is the funding that makes the project possible and the attention that keeps it visible. The running pays for the work and makes a dream project happen today…
So no, the race is not the point. The point is what the community asked for, what got built, and whether the money stayed. The race is how we celebrate that it did all those things, and hopefully a great deal more. The day with the kilometre number and finishing time is the smaller half, and once you have felt that, you cannot really go back to the other kind. This is an addictive place to be.
The waitlist is open and gets first pick.
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The Rwanda Impact Marathon is a week-long social impact marathon in Muganza, Nyaruguru District, Southern Province, run by Impact Marathon Series. The 2027 edition takes place in June 2027 with 10km, 21km, 42km and ultramarathon distances. Impact Marathon’s charitable work runs through the Impact Marathon Foundation (GivingWorks, registered charity no. 1078770).
